Monday, August 26, 2013

Say Something Good About Detroit: Dr. Robin Boyle, Chair of the Department of Urban Studies at W.SU. in Detroit

I leaned heavily on Dr. Robin Boyle to give me a positive piece for my blog. He kindly allowed me to publish this one. Dr. Boyle came to the US from Glasgow, another challenged urban area.

Robin Boyle is Professor of Urban Planning and Chair of the Department of Urban
Studies and Planning (DUSP), Wayne State University (WSU) in Detroit, Michigan.

Active in professional organizations, he is co-chair of the Detroit chapter of the Urban
Land Institute [ULI] and serves on the board of the Michigan Suburbs Alliance. In 2004
he was nominated to the Planning Board for the City of Birmingham, Mi., becoming
chair in 2006.
Research interests include (1) planning and design for an aging society, (2)
investment patterns in residential and retail development, (3) the issue of vacant land in
central cities. This work led to securing funding from the Land Policy Program at MSU
and to collaboration with the Michigan Suburbs Alliance (MSA) and in particular their
successful Redevelopment Ready Communities initiative.

THE POSSIBILITY OF DETROIT FUTURE CITY

Introduced by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing in the fall of 2010,
the Detroit Works Project was
conceived “as a process to create a shared, achievable vision for our future
that would serve as a guide to help improve the physical, social and economic
landscape of our city”. Largely funded by the foundation community, notably the
Kresge Foundation of Troy, Michigan, the initial project was led by a NYC
architect, Ms. Toni Griffin, whose task was, with a local firm of architects
and designers (led by Dan Kinkead of Hamilton Anderson Associates), to manage a
multi-national team of planning and design consultants, including world-renown Skidmore,
Owings and Merrill. In July of 2011 Mayor Dave Bing introduced the Short Term Actions
strategy of the Detroit Works Project and announced the separation of the
project into two tracks—Short Term Actions and Long Term
Planning. This Long Term Planning project eventually morphed
into Detroit Future City, published
at the beginning of 2013.

But first, some largely forgotten planning history.

In 1970, the third volume of the
1965-1970 Detroit Plan was released
with the sub-heading: “A Concept for Future Development”. This study/plan, embracing 23,000 square
miles of southeastern Michigan, with Detroit as its central city, became the
road map for the region and for a generation. “Build-out” across the suburbs,
with new community development spreading from Toledo to the Thumb of Michigan,
from Windsor in Canada all the way to Jackson and beyond, became the de facto development pattern for the
region. This grand plan for Detroit’s metropolitan region never achieved its
lofty goals or ambitious targets but it did drive sprawl across the burgeoning
suburban landscape. And despite some fine ideas in the plan, it did precious
little to stem the loss of business, jobs and people from Detroit. In contrast, I contend that the Detroit Plan
played a critical role in the hollowing out of the city.

As if you need reminding, the
population in the city of Detroit in 1970 was measured at 1,670,114; by 2010
the Census recorded 713,777 residents in the city, a loss of 58 percent over 40
years.

Forty-three years after the conclusion of the Detroit Plan, Detroit Future City brought to the
public, to business and community leaders, and to government planners a wholly
different trajectory for Detroit. Using its full and more useful title: Detroit Future City – Detroit Strategic
Framework Plan this is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive, most engaged
and most relevant plan I have seen in the past quarter century in any city in
America’s troubled heartland. It embraces the structural economic shocks that
have and continue to disrupt whole communities once predicated on making things.
It lays bare the reality of spatial segregation – by class, color and
community. It doesn’t hide from the community impact of poverty, of
joblessness, of abandonment, of emptiness across too much of Detroit.

Then it turns to find possibility in this the most
devastated of the rust-belt cities. To draw from the Plan’s Executive Summary,
this possibility can be found not merely in terms of location on the Detroit
River, or available land or its institutional bones but in the “resiliency,
creativity, and ingenuity of its people and organizations–the city’s human and
social capital”.

The content of the Plan is similarly broad-based and
impressive. The survey, analysis and prescription that are found in the Plan’s
Five Elements are interconnected, sophisticated, nuanced and perhaps most
importantly, useful. The Plan skillfully
incorporates recommendations that are grounded in the possibilities of the city
and its residents but also reflective and inclusive of some of the most
advanced ideas in land use planning and redesign. And it doesn’t end with
simply a catalogue of transformative ideas. It looks deep in the weeds of
ownership, of management and of coordination. It forces the reader to address
the imperatives for public action and the impact that action can have on the
city and its future.

And finally, this Plan began with a commitment to civic
engagement, to genuine and authentic participation from all peoples and parts
of Detroit. Despite some huge challenges and an often-toxic political and
fiscal environment, the people that made Detroit
Future City stayed the course, developing the plan and its recommendations
in the full glare of public scrutiny and with almost endless community
involvement.

The challenge, now, is moving forward with implementation and
real change. The Kresge Foundation and others have committed to this process,
with Dan Kinkead and Heidi Alcock (shifting recently from Community Legal
Resources) leading a new nonprofit agency with just this charge. But they face
a Herculean task, made all the difficult by the fragility of the region’s
economy, the depth of underinvestment-private and public-in the city and the
dark clouds of insolvency hanging over the city, its workers, residents and
investors.

Recent Reads

About Me

Patricia Abbott is the author of more than 125 stories that have appeared online, in print journals and in various anthologies. She is the author of two print novels CONCRETE ANGEL (2015) and SHOT IN DETROIT (2016)(Polis Books). CONCRETE ANGEL was nominated for an Anthony and Macavity Award in 2016. SHOT IN DETROIT was nominated for an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award in 2017. A collection of her stories I BRING SORROW AND OTHER STORIES OF TRANSGRESSION will appear in 2018.